Archive for the 'Fusion Stories' Category

In my post At Home in the World, I wrote about my great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side, the Runaway Boy who became the first ancestor that we can remember.

THE GRAVE

When I was a child, I remember being told that his grave was in an ancient Chinese cemtery up on a hill in the jungle outside Taiping,
Malaysia. He had died in Malaya, never seeing China, his homeland, since he ran away from the bandits who had captured him. Only a few men in the family knew how to find the grave in the jungle. No women could go and visit the grave because the jungle was too dangerous - and certainly I would not be alloed to go as a little girl. The location was handed down to my second cousins, however, father to son, man to boy.

THE RAID

One night, a hundred and fifty years ago, in Southern China, bandits raided my great-great-grandfather’s village. He was a boy and somehow, escaped the carnage. Some versions of the story in my family say the chief bandit felt pity for him and took him away with the bandit gant. Another version says that the gang rounded up the boys of the village to be their boot boys or to sell as slaves.

THE BANDITS

The boy spends many years with the bandits until he becomes a grown man. Some say the bandit chief took him as a son and groomed him to be his successor. Others say the boy never forgot the night of the raid and the murder of his family - he silently vowed vengeance and bided his time. Yet another sotry goes that the boy had been a prince and one day, somehow, he discovers his true identity while part of the bandit gang.

ESCAPE

In any event, when he was a grown man, he ran away from the bandit gant and made his way to a port on the coast. There, he boarded a junk to Malaya, paying his passage as an indentured labourer. One story says that he made his escape on his eighteenth birthday. Another says he killed the bandit chief to honour his vow of vengeance - even though he had come to love the chief as his father. And, well, the prince version is just to silly to even continue… Whatever the trigger, at any rate, he had to escape the country for fear of his life or to forever forget the tragedies of his past.

THE LEGACY

When I look at the generations of the family that came after this boy, the descendants of this bandit heir apparent, I do not see fighting men or thieves or murderers or soulds tortured by dark memories. My family are all responsible, sensible, law-abiding and well, rather boring citizens.

When I was twelve, I interviewed my grandfather, the grandson of the Runaway Boy, and he told the story into my tape recorder. His version is straightforward, without the glamourous embellishment. My grandfather died the next year and the tape is our only recording of his voice. I had had the intention at that time to write a book about the family. There is a handwritten exercise book with my childish version of the story, full of pawing horses and flames and screaming villagers. There is also another version, written in my twenties, that I abandoned just before writing The Flame Tree - fifteen years had passed and this version was still full of thundering horses hooves and a boy scooped up while running to hide in the fields.

The manuscript is still unfinished after thirty years. People tell me I should finish writing that book - Chinese family sagas have been all the rage; here’s my chance to launch my Wild Swans out into the world. But I think I like the myth - or the many myths - too much to bring myself to write the definitive story. The myths make us dark and glamourous - the lawyers and accountants and doctors and teachers that this boy’s DNA came to create. It’s cool to know, in my modern, city-bound life that if armageddon came I have inside me the genes to swash and buckle my way to survival and escape, bandit-style…

At any rate, whatever truth or otherwise lurks in those myths, they do tell us one true thing about my great-great-grandfather - whether he had really been a bandit or a prince or a murderer, he was certainly a heck of a storyteller.

pic courtesy of peter.macdonald @ flickr; no derivations permitted

“>The Day Without An Immigrant earlier this month made me think about how migration has shaped my family.

Our family history can be traced back the furthest on my mother’s side. It goes back four generations to China, when - so the story goes - a young man ran away from bandits and took a junk to Malaya, paying his way be becoming an indentured labourer. Over the years in the thick tropical heat, he worked off his debt and made a life and home in his new country.

My Grandma grew up in pre-revolution China, the eldest daughter of a Presbyterian minister. She used to tell us stories of playing in the rice fields with her cousins and helping her mother to make broth on cold winter nights. Her father was sent as a missionary to Singapore and so, that branch of the family arrived in the Malay archipelago.

My Grandfather, the grandson of the runaway boy, met Grandma when they were studying to be doctors at Singapore University in the 1930s.

Looking back over the generations on both sides of my family, it seems they thrived in Malaya and came to call it home. Grandfather was involved in politics and helped to shape the nation of Malaysia after independence from the British in the 1960s. From copies of his speeches I found recently, I know that he saw Malaysia as his home and felt passionately about its future.

Then in the 1970s, there was a general wave of migration from Malaysia to the Anglo-Saxon countries (UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) by young professionals and their families. These "Western" countries were looking for doctors and engineers and many of my uncles and aunts fit the bill and they saw new and exciting opportunities. My parets are now the only ones of their siblings still based in Malaysia where my father continues to enjoy his work and lifestyle there.

So when we all meet up, my uncles and aunts and cousins and my siblings and me, it is like an international convention. Among us are Brits, Malaysians, Americans, Canadians and Australians - oh, and Dutch. My uncles and aunts have settled comfortably in their new countries but still retain a strong emotioal bond to the country where they were born. For my cousins and siblings and me, however, we are westernised in our values, thinking and outlook and consider our new countries to be home. Yet, Malaysia is in our blood as we are in each other’s blood and although we may be British or Australian or Canadian or American by law, I think we still have Malaysia inside us.

I will be writing more about the individual immigrant stories in my family in future posts.

I migrated to the UK about 13 years ago from Malaysia. Many of my friends have come here from Canada, South Africa, Malaysia, America and other countries. I know other people from the UK who have migrated to New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore and all over the world.

A recent report found that migrants from Eastern Europe are settling and integrating well in the UK and it is because of them that interests rates are as low as they are here, which is a good thing for the economy.

Immigration remains a hot political issue in many countries all over the world, notwithstanding that it is generally found that immigrants are good for the host country in many ways. I was fascinated b the rallies last weekend in the US where immigrants came out in force to show what would happen to the economy without them.

Bloggers were of course at the forefront with photos and personal accounts of the May Day rallies - take a look for yourself at http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/02/la_daywithoutanimmig.html.. There are links to rallies in different cities across the US, including New York and San Francisco.

The photos are amazing, showing the wide city streets heaving with people. There are also personal stories of immigrants taking part.

You can also watch video footage of the rallies at http://mediarights.org/may1/. (For filmmakers amongst you, this is also a site where you can upload and publicise your own film of a local event - it seems to be US based but may be of interest nonetheless.)